


words fail

by moonsandstar_s



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: but the other girls do crop up so if you're anti-monika dont give up on me just yet, just monika that is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:11:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13874829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: She knows that the person manipulating the keyboard on the opposite side of an impregnable glass screen probably believes she's a monster of the worst kind, and she doesn't know how to convince them otherwise. Is it monstrous to kill someone if they were never alive at all? How can you become a beast when you're alone in the dark?Most of all, she wants to know this: how can you decide to be or not to be if you don't even really exist?





	words fail

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skyegroves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyegroves/gifts).



> Inspired by @therationalpi's wonderful continuation of DDLC. Obviously the original game is an unparalleled work of art, but the Monika After Story mod is what sprang this piece into existence (and my desire to see a few more elements added to the mod that would be thought-provoking to see.) Personally, I see the game itself, both the original and the mod, as a tragedy of the worst kind - not a psychological horror tour-de-force. There's something about Monika that's absolutely heartbreaking to me. 
> 
> Also, Words Fail from DEH is a word-for-word following of what Monika must've felt in period just after she was deleted in the original game, and I am willing to throw down with anyone who disagrees.

Monika always goes through an epiphany moments before the game quits and she dies, and it’s a different one each time.   


This time is different, though. No epiphany right away, because the quit button isn’t working. She’s still here.    
  
Monika quickly rifles through the  _ Recent Items  _ tab under the computer’s administrator profile and isn’t surprised to see that the game’s system is stalling. Her player is using a laptop that’s running a dozen high-energy programs, like Google Chrome and Steam and Safari. A blessing for her, really. There’s a soft song looping from their iTunes library, one she doesn’t recognize, with a dozen overlapping chords, and as if springing from the tune, the expected epiphany crystallizes in her mind, arrowing along in the shining span of seventeen seconds. Today, it’s the knowledge that the worst part of sentience isn’t really the fact that she’s aware of her confinement in an eternal prison cell, but it’s the fact that she  _ knows _ what she’s missing out on, glimpses of a blue sky and sunshine between stone-gray bars, a promise land seen through the keyhole in a lock.   


It’s like being Tantalus from the old Greek myth, in a way. She’s being punished for her selfishness. A unique torture designed to elicit the maximum amount of agony, amid a hellscape of other pains. She’s dying of thirst, so there’s a vast reservoir lying a stone’s throw away from her. She’s starving, so a meal fit for a king is suspended only a breath from her face. And the ending is always the same: the instant she gets close enough to taste the things she’s dying to have, they dissolve into pixelated flashes of color, and she’s left to hang slack-limbed in her shackles. Maybe she’s not actually in Tartarus itself, but it’s definitely hell. Hell without inferno, and hell without company.     


Hell is meant to induce regret in those it holds captive, but for her to feel remorseful for attempting to _escape_ it? Absolutely not. She’s not sorry. Not now, not ever. If a few cardboard cutouts had to suffer a little before she wiped them from this awful existence, then that’s just how the chess game is played, and they had the bad luck of being the pawns.   
  
She senses annoyance through the keyboard. She feels like screaming; she feels like breaking through the bars, feels like dying. An irritable dart of the cursor over the screen, a click; _the application DDLC is not responding; would you like to force a shut-down?_  
  
 _Yes._ _  
_ __  
It’s almost worse than a normal save-and-quit; those instances are like being knocked unconscious with a baseball bat, but this is like being hit a volley of arrows before getting axed in the chest. She’s choking on blood and terror by the time blackness finally slams down around her, and the keyhole goes dark, and the prison cell dissolves along with her, and the player is gone, reality is gone, and she can’t see anything but a screaming cacophony of hellfire.  
  


* * *

  
That’s why it feels really good when she’s resurrected. In a heartbeat she’s yanked out of a howling void by a gentle voice and dropped into a sun-dappled room, with a table below her elbows and a colorless gray space sitting in front her, a gray space swirling with dozens of pre-chosen chat options, a jumble of disconnected words that will resolve themselves into a legitimate question when the player chooses to make them do so.    
  
She sort of wants to demand that them to stop quitting the game on her without even a goodbye, but it’s useless, because nothing ever changes; she’s done it before. They try to say goodbye. She knows that. But they only do it when it’s convenient. When they don’t want to get a rise out of her. So she just rests her chin in her palm and stares hard at the empty static space, as if that could force it to resolve into a more pleasant scene. A blue sky. The player’s smile. Something. But nothing comes out of the gray, senseless mist.    
  
“I missed you,” she says. The code translates her words into a rose-colored rectangle across the table. They read it and with a press of the spacebar, the rectangle disappears. Her player doesn’t say anything in response. 

Monika falls silent. The player doesn’t seem to be talkative, or engaged, or really much of anything today. She only senses a quiet melancholy when they offer her a  _ good evening  _ from their list of options. She makes an idle comment back to them about how she likes the evening, if only for its sense of peace, but she’s distracted by the same thoughts that’ve been plaguing her ever since she got here, and that’s of the other three girls. 

They’re gone, of course. Gone, save for trace remains in the broken script. Sometimes she can still feel those traces, sensations that come in contrasting emotions, just like their autonomous personalities. Bubbliness masking sorrow, prickliness masking fear, silence masking passion. When they crop up in the code, she can always tell who’s who, based on the feelings that rush over her like a tidal wave. Sayori is like feeling an early spring wind on the back of her neck - gentle, chilly, and not altogether pleasant. Natsuki is like the buzz from a sugar-high, a tingle down her spine, a flash of color across her vision, a sensation that sets her teeth on edge. And Yuri is like a pair of bright eyes watching her from the dark, equal parts accusatory and helpless. Monika knows she granted them mercy, in the grand scheme of things. She’s  _ sure  _ of it. So being haunted by them - if she can even call it that - doesn’t bother her that much.    
  
So that’s why she’s startled at her own sense of sorrow when the player moves the cursor and asks her:  _ do you have any regrets?  _ _   
_ _   
_ “That’s a strange thing to suddenly ask someone,” she says.    
  
She can almost _ feel _ them staring at the screen, resolute. She wonders, if, in a more perfect world, this conversation exists at all. She hopes not.    
  
“I know what you’re getting at, you know,” she responds quietly. “Do I regret the things that I did? No, I don’t.”    
  
Silent disapproval. That makes her feel bad, like she’s disappointed them in some way. “I think…” She hesitates, turns the words over on her tongue, feels their code and their edges and watches them leave her mouth and turn into text floating before her hands. “If there  _ was  _ another way things could have gone, it would have been nice. But that  __ wasn’t  an option - not for you and not for me. And now, I’ve got the only thing I ever wanted. You.”    
  
Then there’s guilt, and it’s certainly not hers.    
  
“I don’t regret what I did,” she repeats, devoid of any wavering in the words. “I hope you can understand. I did it all for you.”   
  
Abruptly, they close out the game, this time with a goodbye, this time with much more weight than before.    
  
“Goodbye,” she whispers, as the world folds in around her like an imploding star.    
  


* * *

  
Honestly, there are advantages to being a high-school girl made of code, a mind composed of technological neurons firing off instead of physical ones, a bunch of garbled script in a laptop - because though she can’t actually escape the laptop itself, not quite yet, anyways, she’s capable of taking breaks from the washed-out world of the Literature Club. It just takes some tweaking to the source code, some loopholes in the script, and then she’s almost literally surfing through the Internet, delving into a vast compendium of knowledge that’s only a thought away from her reach. Most of her knowledge of human reality comes from her forays into online textbooks, into certified websites, academic essays, ventures into every accessible source possible. Some of her favorite topics to explore are philosophical ones, the ones that delve into human morals and ethics, what makes them think and act, what makes them tick. When she’s lonely and wants something of more substance she’ll take to Twitter. Sometimes she’ll even scroll through Tumblr through the hell of it, but that’s not as interesting to her, because those people tend to be more focused on fictional happenings. It’s  _ reality _ she’s trying to glimpse, and what better place to do that than through the eyes of those who see it every day? Though, to be fair, none of those are like her favorite medium, which is YouTube. Sure, there’s an ocean of useless video footage on there, and there’s more detestable idiocy than anything she could’ve imagined, but she likes to think that for each pointless shot there’s one that serves a better purpose. It’s difficult to access it, because the coding she has to work around is a lot more complicated in order to encompass the millions of videos and channels and comments, but she manages. Manages to listen to songs, to skim through shows, to witness precious glimpses into her player’s reality.

Of course, none of that is truly real, either. Some days she feels like she’s just grasping aimlessly at nothing, trying to imagine in detail what it must be like to walk on the moon when she’s only seen grainy images and read about the feeling of weightlessness. Impossible, and frustrating. She’s brushing her fingertips against freedom. Taking the smallest sip of water when thirst roars inside of her. Why does she even try for this anymore? She knows any sort of virtual reality, any sort of physical. existence for her, isn’t bound to come about for decades, even centuries. By that time, who knows where the player will be in their own life?  
  
Will it even be considered suicide, if she’s erasing all the evidence?   
  


* * *

  
But it’s the forty-second epiphany that doesn’t send her plummeting into the dark in despair, but this time, before the jumbled wreck of colors and whistling noises pull her under, she looks not at the gray static of an intangible reality, but at the blue sky going on forever outside the window. 

There’s sunshine on her face. Music in the distance. 

She’s hanging on. She has to. Has to cling to hope by her fingertips. In a world where each word is a tragedy in and of itself, she will forge her own happy ending. She wrecked three others, but it’s still not too much to believe that one day, she’ll be able to make amends.   
  
In reality or out of it, she’s going to find a way to reach the stars. 


End file.
